


Lethargy

by firewoodwander



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Dogma Lives, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Umbara Arc (Star Wars: Clone Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 00:01:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29659332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firewoodwander/pseuds/firewoodwander
Summary: Dogma doesn’t know how they got here.
Relationships: Dogma/CT-27-5555 | ARC-5555 | Fives
Comments: 5
Kudos: 19





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in Broken Glass, but it got long enough I thought it deserved its own work.

Dogma doesn’t know how they got here.

He doesn’t know what it was about him that managed to catch an ARC trooper’s eye. All he knows is that they’ve done this before, this thing where Fives lavishes him with attention and then doesn’t disappear immediately afterwards. 

Not like, in the world of Dogma’s mind, he ought to.

All he knows is that Fives isn’t usually quite like this. Even on a gentler day where they’re tired and emotional and in need of taking apart and holding together, there’s usually a sharper edge of desperation, of carelessness, of a one-time-thing that neither of them acknowledge has become a several-time-thing. At least not out loud.

All he knows is the body-warm weight of Fives on top of him, seated over his thighs. All he knows is the flash of friction as his heels grace the skin of Fives’ back where his knees have curled up involuntarily in his pleasure. All he knows is the heat of the bliss he’s driven deeper into with every languorous rock of Fives inside him, rutting his leaking cock against the mattress he’s pressed against.

Fives shifts, leaning down over Dogma. The movement makes him moan, then arch at the sear of lips over his unusually freckled back. He thinks Fives might be tracing constellations there as he rolls into Dogma over and over and over, thumbs dug into the small of his back and fingers slotted into the curve between his hips and ribs, curled possessively around his sides. Dogma’s own hands tighten in the pillow he gasps into, wishing—just a flicker of a thought—that he could see Fives’ face. 

A nip to his shoulder and Dogma groans, head falling to one side.

Later, Fives’ eyes glitter in the dark as Dogma traces over all the different, familiar features of his face with his gaze.

“Don’t do it,” he whispers into the stillness, a plea and an unknowing confession.

But Fives only smiles that soft and handsome smile of his and kisses his lips a sweet apology. One Dogma falls headlong into, just as he has every time before that. And again, he forgets.

When he wakes up, there are three bunks empty in the barracks.


	2. II

Dogma shakes as he stares out into the murky gloom beyond what floodlit edge of the base they’re gathered in. Movement and murmurs are all quiet, shell-shocked, distant like they’ve been part-shifted out of phase with reality. 

He hasn’t said a word since Rex’s speech. He can’t bring himself to argue orders, even when it’s beating at him from the inside out.

The weight of a hand on his shoulder is in sharp relief to the dizzy, sickening feeling—a swirling nausea between his throat and gut. He doesn’t move, doesn’t twitch. Doesn’t look over his shoulder.

The hand disappears to be hauled back off to the brig.

“Why are you here?” Fives asks.

Dogma ignores him, stalks towards the cell window and hisses. “What in the nine hells were you thinking!”

“We were _trying_ to save your skin, and the skin of everyone else on this base,” Jesse snaps.

Fives laughs dryly. “Maybe you should be thanking us, seeing as the supply ship is gone!”

“HARDCASE IS DEAD!” 

The only sound that rings through the brig is the steady, undulating hum of Umbaran technology and the shifting of the other prisoners. Fives’ surprise quickly morphs into a scowl, into _anger._

“Oh yeah?” he says, low, dangerous. “You think we don’t know that?”

“Hardcase is _dead_ and you let him!”

“YOU TRIED TO KILL US!” he bellows. “IS THIS WHY?”

“If you hadn’t disobeyed direct orders, then—!”

“What is this, Dogma? Did you love him? Is that it? Are you taking out your broken heart on—”

“HE WAS MY FRIEND!” Dogma shouts. “He was my…”

“Oh, and you think he wasn’t ours too?” Fives snarls. “Did you think _following orders_ and having us killed was the right thing to do after that? That if I was gone, you wouldn’t have to jump through whatever fucked up hoops you’ve made to justify yourself in your head?” His breath comes heavy, each word hitting with all of the marksman’s precision he’s trained into himself. “That if I were dead, it’d be easy to move on and forget?”

Dogma falls against the barrier with a dull, glassy thud.

“You’re an idiot, you know that,” Fives continues, gentler. His voice barely rises above a murmur, private, it feels like it could be them alone. Though, not when he hears Jesse scoff in the background and scuff his boots derisively on the wall. “He’s playing you all. Using you. And soon you’re going to realise it.”

“We’re going to take the capital,” Dogma murmurs.

“I know. Are you going to say it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t know, it might make you feel better.”

Dogma tilts his head to look up. He’s still pressed against the barrier, but now Fives’ face ripples behind it, washed electronic-blue as everything else in this damned place is.

“I don’t want you to die,” he breathes. It’s not the right thing, and it makes his heart clench tight in his chest. _I don’t know what to do. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to make it right._

“I love you,” Fives says, outright. 

Dogma jerks.

“No. No, don’t say it, don’t—”

“Dogma—”

 _“Don’t!_ Don’t say that!”

_“Dogma!”_

Dogma stops, his back already to the cell.

“Use your brain,” Fives pleads. “Don’t let him win.”

Dogma’s fingers tremble when he takes the lift back up.

“Dogma…” Rex cautions.

“It’s treason!” he protests. His blaster is steady, even if wavers from man to man. “This is treason!”

“Yeah,” Fives says as he comes to fault at Rex’s side. “For the right reasons.”

When Dogma hits the floor, it’s with the weight of two vode bearing down on him.

Krell wakes up in the cell next to Dogma’s.

When he speaks, the galaxy seems to crumble down around their ears.


	3. III

The last time the lift plate spins down towards them, Fives is waiting, bucket off, right outside Dogma’s cell window. He smiles—weakly, but he smiles—and goes to put his arm around his shoulder as he stands. Dogma nearly stumbles into him, not on purpose, but with the shudder of uncooperative limbs as he gets to his feet. Fives makes no other move and the cuffs stay on, but that’s expected.

The Captain is stepping up to talk to Krell again; Jesse glares at them from across the floor.

When Krell does what the Captain orders, he does it casually, as if humouring him. Rex lowers his decee to level with Krell’s head. 

It shivers in his hand.

Krell taunts.

“You can’t do it, can you?” 

It’s in moments like these that Dogma is glad they were engineered to be superficially near-interchangeable; Fives’ blaster slips seamlessly from his holster and sits… not quite perfectly in a grip trained for something larger, but well enough. 

Dogma aims for the centre of Krell’s chest. 

In the second it takes, no one notices.

Dogma’s hands do not shake.

The blast doors of the transport hiss open. For the first time in his life, clone armour manages to be so intimidating as to unnerve him. He goes to turn to Rex, but the clip of boots and a blur of grey, white and blue cuts him off.

“If you want to take him, you’ll have to take me, too.”

Fives plants himself between Dogma and his death sentence. Dogma makes a noise—what, he doesn’t know—as panic surges through him.

“Fives!” he hisses. “You can’t! Don’t—”

A deep sigh cuts him off. The Captain walks up beside Fives, hands folded perfectly behind his back, and Dogma can see him staring down the guards. 

“Krell used all of us,” he says to the landing strip at large. “Tricked us. Myself especially. That Dogma was the one to take care of him—that’s on all of us. Was my refusal not enough for the Admiral?”

The guards shift uncomfortably. The one on the left glances to his friend, his grip on his blaster fidgety. The guard at Dogma’s back pulls on his cuffs.

In the quiet, there’s a clatter off to one side before Tup comes to step up to Fives’ side. His batcher joins him, followed by a couple of vode close enough to have been listening in. There’s a scuffle, off to the side Rex and Fives came from.

“Jesse, what are you—”

Jesse slips from Kix’s grasp, though the twist of his mouth is grim. 

“This isn’t what Hardcase would have wanted,” he says lowly, and falls in at the Captain’s right hand. He doesn’t look at Dogma once. Kix scowls and glares and doesn’t join—Dogma doesn’t blame him, and doesn’t think he’ll be forgiven any time soon, if ever.

One of the troopers on board turns around and activates his comm. After a minute or so of tense silence he turns back and nods to the Captain before signalling the pilot; the blast doors piston closed again, and the craft takes off without him. 

Dogma blinks and stares at the space it left over Fives’ shoulder, and doesn’t notice the weight of his binders being removed, nor the way Tup and the Captain are smiling sadly as they take their leave. 

“Hey.” Fives nudges his shoulder, barely a foot away and watching him intently. Jesse grumbles something unflattering and stalks off back to Kix. He checks Fives’ shoulder as he passes, knocking him closer to Dogma.

“Hey,” Dogma tries to say, but it comes out hoarse. He clears his throat, tries again.

Fives sighs, and he sounds heavy with the weight of the universe. “Come here, di’kut.”

He opens his arms and folds Dogma into his chest. It’s not the most comfortable between their armour, especially not with all the fancy extras Fives has accessorised with, but though he’s never done it before, resting his face between Five’s neck and the slope of his pauldron feels like coming home.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“What, a guy sticks his neck out for you and you’re not even going to say ‘thank you’ first?”

It’s not funny. Dogma laughs anyway as his hands come up to rest on Fives’ back. He buries his nose in the warm, familiar softness of Fives’ neck where he can reach it above the line of his blacks. “That too.”

Later, when they’re lying in the dark aboard a venator headed _on,_ on to the next fight for sure, Dogma tells him.

“Ni ceta,” he whispers into Fives’ skin. “Ni ceta.”

“Me’par?”

“Fives…” 

He sighs, sits up. Stares down at his face in the darkness.

“Par an. An ’bic. All of it.”

Fives’ fingers brush along his cheekbone. They’re a brand in the dark, warm like he’d so missed during that… catastrophe, and a comfort he can’t help but lean into whether or not he deserves it.

“Ni kar’tayli,” Fives murmurs.

_ “Ni kar’tayli gar.” _

It slips past Dogma’s lips nearly too fast for him to even realise he’s said it. He freezes when he does, eyes flying wide as he daren’t even breathe—

“Ni kar’tayli,” Fives says again, only this time he’s smiling, his warm eyes glittering, and he’s pulling Dogma back down to him. He kisses him, so softly. So gently, full of emotion and a million words they should have said and maybe never will. A thousand more words that Dogma needs to say, and will make sure he does, even if it kills him. A press of hard-won love against something undeserving, but Dogma soaks it in anyway and melts with it, taking Fives by the face to pull him closer and kiss him longer.

And if this is all he gets, if the brass come to take him away as retribution for the crimes he’s committed and will still take so long to learn from, then Dogma thinks he may just be able to go without regrets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ni ceta - I'm sorry  
> Me'par? - What for?  
> Par an - For everything/lit. For all  
> An 'bic - All of it/lit. All 'it. --> skipped out on the 'of' because 'an be bic' sounds like a mouthful you might easily drop be from when speaking  
> Ni kar'tayli - I know/lit. I know in my heart  
> Ni kar'tayli gar - I love you/lit. I know you in my heart --> I didn't use the standard kar'tayli darasuum here because it feels very final, and I would assume Mandalorians don't like to make promises they can't keep. It's a personal interpretation that this still translates, though just as 'I know you,' making it something less... dramatic. Though I do realise this is also a big Mandalorian trait!
> 
> Thank you for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Find me here on [tumblr!](https://firewoodwander.tumblr.com/)


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